4/18 Bernie News Roundup – A Call For ‘Unity’ In Portland, Sanders To Campaign For Quist & More

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called on Maine Democrats to help “transform” the party through political activism at all levels of government Monday during the first stop of a national tour aimed at unifying a fractured base.

“Our job is to radically transform the Democratic Party . . . into a 50-state party and a party that does not continue to ignore half of the states in our country,” Sanders, whose populist rise caused major heartburn within the Democratic National Committee last year, told the fired-up Portland crowd at the State Theatre. “Our job is to create a democratic party, a grassroots party where decisions are made up from the bottom on up, not from the top on down.”

Sanders – who many in the crowd believe should and perhaps could have been president – took the stage immediately after the man tasked with convincing voters from Maine to Alaska that the Democratic Party still stands for them.

Tom Perez, the newly elected chairman of the DNC, acknowledged that the party will “have to earn your trust” but pledged to lead a new, more inclusive party focused on rebuilding.

“The mission of the new DNC is not simply to elect the president of the United States,” Perez said. “It is to elect Democrats from the school board to the Senate.”

More than 1,500 people gathered at the Portland theater for the event, dubbed the “Come Together and Fight Back” rally.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced plans Monday to campaign with Rob Quist, the banjo-strumming populist Democrat running for Montana’s open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“Rob Quist is the only person in this race who understands that we need a government in Washington that works for all Montanans and all Americans and not just the special interests and the billionaire class,” Sanders said in a statement. “I look forward to campaigning with him in May and working with him in Congress.”

Quist, a legendary folk musician who co-founded the Mission Mountain Wood Band, won his party’s nomination in March after barnstorming the state, encouraging supporters to organize Democratic committees in counties long dominated by the GOP. He defeated a handful of state legislators to win the nomination for the special election called for May 25 after Ryan Zinke, who had won re-election for the House seat, became President Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior.

Until recently, top Democratic officials had largely ignored the Montana campaign, even as voters clamored for the party to focus on down-ballot races that could flip historically red congressional seats.

But Sanders’ organization, Our Revolution, recently endorsed Quist. And earlier this month, the Vermont senator, who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Huffington Post he’d offered to make a stop in Montana on his national tour with Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez sometime after Easter.

“I’m excited that Bernie Sanders recognizes that our grassroots campaign is building momentum and has the best chance in decades to take back Montana’s U.S. House seat for the rest of us,” Quist said. “In the U.S. House, I’ll be a voice to protect our public lands, fight for working families, work for better health care, and stand up to Wall Street and special interests.”

Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is heading to North Texas on Thursday to rally with fellow Democrats.

The 75-year-old Vermont senator, with other Democratic Party leaders, will gather with grassroots activists and supporters at noon at the Verizon Theater in Grand Prairie to talk about their goals, ranging from boosting the minimum wage to adopting comprehensive immigration and tax reform.

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality and a shrinking middle class, we need a government which represents all Americans, not just Wall Street, multinational corporations and the top 1 percent,” said a statement from Sanders and Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Keith Ellison.

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Tarrant County Democratic Party Chair Deborah Peoples will be at the event, giving a welcome speech from Tarrant County.

“I am thrilled they would bring this tour to Texas and specifically to Tarrant County,” she said. “We are ready to fight back.”

She said Republicans are tampering with issues from education to healthcare, endangering people’s lives.
“We are already resisting but it never hurts to get a good shot in the arm,” she said. “I think Tarrant County is ready for change. The level of activism we are seeing is positively heartwarming.”

I haven’t ever had any contact with his campaign, but did think about emailing just so I can try and guarantee myself admittance (I’ll have to leave work early and hope I can make it in time). Given the hours, etc I don’t think it will be as crowded as last time, but certainly don’t want to miss my chance!

Symmetric Anthropology – our culture is under attack like the cultures of indigenous people were attacked by the colonialists

An interview of Bruno Latour by an anthropologist studying a culture that has almost been destroyed in a generation after existing for 12,000 years

BL: Do we want someone representative of the entrenched categories of a culture,
or do we want to seize the occasion given by rare diplomatic encounters
to modify deeply what we hold on to? That’s where couching ethnography
in a diplomatic instead of an epistemological mode makes a big difference.
A diplomat is the one who finds degrees of liberty where none was visible
before, when the parties at the negotiation table were simply stating their cases,
their interests, and simply drawing, as the saying goes, red lines they don’t want
to be trespassed. With representatives of the official view attempts to move the
line will surely fail. If Searle is being sent as the ambassador, nothing will move.
He will keep formatting any encounter with the prolegomenon: “is this rational
or irrational?” What I am saying is that things would be different if it is Souriau
who is sent! He might have been an ignoramus in ethnography, but at least he
won’t start with Searle’s question.

CM: Bruno, Bruno nothing of what you say works here. Where have you seen
a negotiation going on? What chance did the Fuegians, for instance, have to
negotiate? In a little over 100 years a 13,000-year-old culture has been almost
wiped out. Who was sent as a diplomat? Guns, microbes, greed, an abominable
landgrab. Diplomacy? It’s a sickening idea really.

BL: Don’t get angry at me, Carolina. I am well aware of those landgrabs, of
the destruction, of those ethnocides. But I am talking of the new landgrab, the
one where the respective positions of the “objects” of study as you said before
and the “scientist” or “observer” have totally changed because they both find
themselves invaded, dispossessed, attacked.

CM: Are you claiming that we the anthropologists with PhDs, grant money,
university jobs (I still hope to get one!) coming from big cities are at a par with
those for whom we have become the spokespersons? Those to whom we try to
give a voice?

BL: Yes, take Nastassja [Martin]’s book on Alaska I like so much… (Martin 2016).

CM: Good case, yes, but would you dare saying the Gwich’in she describes
are being seated at some “negotiation table” together with the missionaries,
A Dialog About a New Meaning of Symmetric Anthropology 333
ecologists, trappers, Federal officials, tourists that are crushing them to bits?
And at the same level? Sorry but this is nonsense.

BL: Carolina, I am not sure what I am hinting at, but what I feel is that there
is a new sense of “symmetric” in the expression of “symmetric anthropology.”
I took it first to mean: “Use the same ethnographic method for those who call
themselves ‘Moderns’ or ‘developed’ and for those who are said to be ‘premodern’
or ‘in development’ or ‘archaic’; and then see which difference you really
can detect.” Not that they ended up being “the same,” mind you, but simply
(I think I have shown it fairly convincingly) that the differences are in no way
where the clichés of Modern versus non-Modern would have placed them.

CM: This is familiar terrain: your moving from Africa to California and bringing
science under ethnographic scrutiny. But this is already dated material.

BL: I guess I am beginning to talk like a veteran. Well but…

CM: You are a veteran!

BL: I am well aware of that, thanks. What’s new is that the situation of losing
one’s ground, of seeing one’s land being taken out by new circumstances
impossible to anticipate, is now common. I insist the situation is common to all
those who are today on any piece of land. In Alaska the same thing happens to
the Indians and, let’s say, to Sarah Palin, and to Nastassja: they are losing their
ground and trying to cope. The symmetry is not complete, I agree, but…

CM: A fraternity between Palin and the Gwich’in, well that would certainly
come as a surprise to the author of Les âmes sauvages!

BL: But when you read in older monographs the complete incomprehension,
I don’t know, for instance of the Arapesh studied by [Don] Tuzin as they see
their culture, their vision of the world disappear in one generation (Tuzin 1997),
and then reading what happens to Alaska, modern Alaska, what happens to the
oil there, to the ice, to the economy, to the legislation, and all of that in less
than a generation, I see a symmetry between the two catastrophes as they come
crashing down on to entire cultures, a symmetry that did not exist before. I
would even say a fraternity—at least a common ground. Or rather a common
loss of ground.

CM: But there is no equivalence in respective power; no similarity in the size of
the tragedy between the First Nations still resisting there, and, for God’s sake,
Sarah Palin!

BL: I know, but it’s because you consider the two sides at two different
moments of the crisis they are thrown into: the Indians have been crushed to
pieces for a century and a half—and have evolved very clever ways to cope
and resist, according to what Nastassja reports—while Palin (okay, let’s not use
Palin, she is probably hopeless, she will disappear without realizing what has
happened to her, she won’t be able to cope), but take the activists, ecologists,
whoever: Are they not themselves carried through the same maelstrom they had

When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez arrive at the State Theatre tonight, David Bright would be there. Bright, an organic farmer who helped Sanders win the state’s Democratic caucuses, was one of Maine’s four voters in the Electoral College. He’d used that role to cast a protest vote for Sanders, relenting and casting a futile vote for Hillary Clinton only after state law forced him to.

His opinion of the Democratic Party’s “establishment” had not improved much since then.

“The DNC has dropped the ball on one congressional campaign after another,” Bright said in an interview before driving from his farm to Portland. “The only way Perez would be safe to come to Maine is to have Bernie by his side. Otherwise, progressives in this state would tear him apart.”

A cursory study of political history shows that political trends come in waves. From the bi-continental activism that took place in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and ’70s to the rise of far-right populist movements on both sides of the pond in 2016, there seems to be a correlation between what happens in the U.S. and what happens in the EU. With France’s Socialist Party’s nominee, it appears that the rise of seemingly utopian ideas is also being shared. Some are referring to socialist presidential nominee Benoît Hamon as France’s Bernie Sanders, and when looking at his ambitious universal income platform and the division his candidacy has stirred among his party, it’s easy to see why.

Hamon is a sprightly 49 to Sanders’ 75, and at 5’4″ stands quite a bit shorter than the gangly Brooklynite-turned-Vermonter, but when it comes to their historical and current stances, the similarities add up. Hamon served in ministerial positions in President François Hollande’s administration, but resigned from his post as education minister because he believed the president had drifted too close to the center to satisfy the Socialist Party’s ideals. When Hamon won the Socialist Party’s primary in January, he achieved what Sanders aimed for but didn’t quite reach — winning the primary of a party he was not active in (though it was one that he had formerly worked for).

I don’t think there’s any way Le Pen is going to win the runoff. She’s losing almost 2-1 to centrist Macron, her likely opponent, and she’s even getting crushed by almost that much by leftist populist Melenchon. Hopefully, scandal plagued establishment right candidate Fillon won’t be her opponent, she has the best chance against him–and he’s pretty awful himself.

Melenchon’s rise has been amazing–mostly coming at the expense of Socialist Hamon (who I probably would vote for), but also some from Le Pen). There’s enough votes on the left side to push Melenchon into one of the top two places and if he was up against Le Pen he would probably win. More likely he would be up against Macron who would be a big favorite.

I saw, am still seeing, a lot of nasty comments from Hillary supporters after Sanders dared to criticize the party for how they (intentionally?) dropped the ball in Kansas. Hard core Hillary supporters and party operatives are still far from ready to consider that they need to do anything differently than what they’ve been doing. They seem to be counting on voters getting disgusted with Trump.

Does Joy complain about Bernie not being ‘a real Democrat’?! She’s awful.

Ms. Reid has been extremely unhelpful in moving forward in a productive way. She feeds her bitter Hillary fans red meat and then turns them loose on social media to vent & have their feeding frenzies seeking out people to mock to assuage their rage.

In “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” The Hill’s Amie Parnes and Sidewire’s Jonathan Allen write that members of the Clinton campaign reached out to Sanders aides in late September to share a script of an ad they wanted the Vermont senator to record.

In the ad, Sanders would tout the former Democratic nominee for her education, healthcare and minimum wage proposals.

And he would talk about how her former rival, Donald Trump, was wrong about climate change and the economy.
At the end of the script were the words: “I’m with her.”

He narrowly lost the Bluegrass State in the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary, now Senator Bernie Sanders is returning to Kentucky with DNC Chair Tom Perez for their “Come Together and Fight Back” tour. The last time the Vermont Senator was in Kentucky, Congressman John Yarmuth was supporting Hillary Clinton. Now Kentucky’s 3rd District Representative is welcoming Sen. Sanders with open arms.

“I’ve always said, I think that Bernie is incredibly important as a crusader for this party and for progressive causes,” said Rep. Yarmuth.

The Congressman said that he will appear at the event Tuesday night at the Palace in Louisville. Late Monday, organizers sent out a news release stating that the program would begin at 7pm and tickets are available through RSVP.

Bernie Sanders drew large crowds in Louisville during the Presidential campaign including a rally under the Big Four Bridge on a night in which thousands cheered on Sen. Sanders hours before he shocked many with a victory in the Indiana Democratic Primary.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has finalized its “unity commission” roster, a group made up largely of supporters of former Democratic presidential primary rivals Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) now tasked with healing the party’s divisions.

Democrats created the framework for the committee at the July national convention, choosing Democratic strategist Jennifer O’Malley Dillon as the chairwoman and Sanders confidant Larry Cohen as the vice chairman. The resolution called for Clinton, Sanders and new DNC Chairman Tom Perez to fill out the remaining members by April 26.

“At the 2016 convention, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and national delegates agreed that in order to capture the energy of Democrats from across the country it is critical that we enhance the nominating process that continues to embrace the big tent of our party,” Perez said in a statement.

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Some of the names have already been made public, such as former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver, Nebraska Democratic Party Chairwoman Jane Kleeb and progressive journalist and activist Nomiki Konst, all representing Sanders.

Sanders’s picks also include Arab American Institute President Jim Zogby, former Nevada state legislator Lucy Flores, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and former Berkeley, Calif., Mayor Gus Newport, according to The Huffington Post.

A quick reminder on Jeffrey Berman: as Mother Jones wrote in July 2015, when news of his hire by Clinton first emerged, “Berman brings expertise on the byzantine rules of caucus delegate counting, but he’s also known as a prominent lobbyist for a project fiercely opposed by environmentalists: the Keystone pipeline.”

“Hillary Clinton has hired a former lobbyist for the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline,” The New Republic’s Rebecca Leber wrote, “further upsetting environmentalists who have long been wary of her commitment to fighting climate change.” As the Huffington Post noted, the firm Berman worked for, Bryan Cave, received $980,000 from TransCanada for lobbying work from 2009 to 2011. Berman was part of the team lobbying for the pipeline, and TransCanada paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his share of the work.

In the Podesta email, Mook explains how Berman planned to coordinate the schedule for Democratic primaries to maximize benefit for Hillary Clinton “if she gets a significant primary challenger.” In such a case, Mook writes, “we need to consider changing course and getting N.Y., N.J. and maybe others to move their dates earlier to give her hefty early wins,” Mook wrote.

And the punchline of the proposed strategy:

“We may need allies to help in this process but we’re going to look at each state one step at a time, limiting as much as possible the perception of direct intervention by the principals.”

But I’m happy that Nomiki Konst (she’s such a fighter!!), Nina Turner (love her!!!!) & Jim Zogby (much respect for him! dares to swim against the current) are on the list!

About 32:50 sec into the video, after Bernie lets the crowd know he is introducing Medicare for All in Congress, there is this little spark in the crowd that is reminiscent of the Evansville, IN rally on May 2nd last year.

Bernie begins:

The insurance companies may not like it. And the drug companies may not like it-”

Supporter: [they can] F$ck off!

Bernie: That’s not the exact words I would use, but that’s not bad, not bad.”

Dustin Peyer, a firefighter, is expected to formally announce his campaign against Heitkamp on Thursday at a marijuana reform rally at the state capitol in Bismarck.

“I’m running for Senate against Heidi Heitkamp. Basically, in my opinion, on the Dem side we have a really boring primary and we can’t allow that to happen anymore,” Peyer told North Dakota radio station WDAY.

He added that his campaign is also “about recognizing that over 60 percent of North Dakota caucused for Bernie Sanders on the Dem side.”

Hopefully, they will stay neutral. And now you’ve got me thinking. If a Berniecrat is running on a corporate-free campaign, how does taking Dem establishment money affect that? We need public financing soooo badly.